No More Learning

Whereas artists can afford to be indifferent to a cultural mechanism that in any case swallows up everything and excludes nothing , not even what is relatively good, this mechanism nevertheless tinges everything that thrives within it with something of its objective indifference. What Marx was still able to presuppose, to some degree innocently, as cultural needs in the concept of a soci- ety ' s general level of achievement , has its dialectic in the fact that in the meantime one does culture a greater honor by forgoing it and not taking part in its festivals than by agreeing to be force-fed. Aesthetic motifs are no less critical of cultural needs than are empirically real ones. Artworks want to break up the eternal ex- change of need and satisfaction, instead of doing injustice to unfulfilled needs by supplying them with substitute satisfactions. Every aesthetic and sociological the- ory of need makes use of what bears the characteristically old-fashioned name of lived aesthetic experience. 7 Its insufficiency is evident in the constitution of lived artistic experiences themselves , if such exist. The supposition of lived artistic ex- periences is based on the assumption of an equivalence between the content of experience -put crudely, the emotional expression of works - and the subjective experience of the recipient. A listener is, in other words, to become excited when the music seems to do so, whereas to the extent that one understands anything, one should become emotionally all the more disinterested the pushier the work's ges- ticulations become . Science could hardly think up anything more alien to art than those experiments that presume to measure aesthetic effect and aesthetic experi- ence by recording the heartbeat. The fount ofany such equivalence remains murky. What purportedly is to be lived or relived in the work- according to popular as- sumption, the feelings ofthe author-is itselfonly a partial element in works and certainly not the decisive one. Works are not depositions of impulses-in any case such depositions are always much disliked by listeners and least likely to be empathically "reexperienced"; they are, rather, radically modified by the autono- mous nexus of the artwork. The interplay of the constructive and the mimetically expressive elements in art is simply suppressed or distorted by the theory of lived experience: The equivalence it posits is not an equivalence at all; rather, one par- ticular aspect is abstracted. This aspect, again removed from the aesthetic nexus of the work and translated back into the empirical world, for a second time be- comes an other of what in any case it is in the work . The shock aroused by impor- tant works is not employed to trigger personal, otherwise repressed emotions. Rather , this shock i s the moment i n which recipients forget themselves and disap- pear into the work; it is the moment of being shaken. The recipients lose their footing; the possibility of truth, embodied in the aesthetic image, becomes tangi- ble. This immediacy, in the fullest sense, of relation to artworks is a function of mediation , of penetrating and encompassing experience [Eifahrung) ; it takes shape in the fraction of an instant, and for this the whole of consciousness is re- quired, not isolated stimuli and responses. The experience of art as that of its truth
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or untruth is more than subjective experience: It is the irruption of objectivity into subjective consciousness. The experience is mediated through subjectivity precisely at the point where the subjective reaction is most intense. In Beethoven many situations are scenes a jaire, perhaps even with the flaw of being staged. The entrance ofthe reprise in the Ninth Symphony, which is the result ofthe sym- phonic process, celebrates its original introduction. It resonates like an overwhelm- ing "Thus it is. " The shudder is a response, colored by fear of the overwhelming; by its affirmation the music at the same time speaks the truth about untruth. Non- judging, artworks point - as with their finger - to their content without its thereby becoming discursive. The spontaneous reaction of the recipient is mimesis of the immediacy of this gesture. In it, however, artworks are not exhausted. The position that this musical passage, once integrated, achieves by its gesture is sub- ject to critique: It poses the question whether the power of being thus-and-not- otherwise - at the epiphany of which such moments in art are aimed - is the index of its truth . Full comprehending experience [Eifahrung] , which terminates in judgment on the nonjudging work, demands a decision and, by extension, the con- cept. The lived experience [Erlebnis] is exclusively an element of such compre- hending experience and faulty because it is subject to persuasion. Works such as the Ninth Symphony exercise a mesmerizing effect: The force they achieve through their structure becomes the force of their effect. In the development of music after Beethoven the suggestive force of works , initially borrowed from so- ciety, has been shunted back to society and become agitative and ideological. Shudder, radically opposed to the conventional idea of experience [Erlebnis], pro- vides no particular satisfaction for the I; it bears no similarity to desire. Rather, it is a memento of the liquidation of the I, which, shaken , perceives its own limited- ness and finitude . This experience [Eifahrung] is contrary to the weakening of the I that the culture industry manipulates. For the culture industry the idea of the shudder is idle nonsense; this is probably the innermost motivation for the deaes- theticization of art. To catch even the slightest glimpse beyond the prison that it itself is, the I requires not distraction but rather the utmost tension; that preserves the shudder, an involuntary comportment, incidentally, from becoming regres- sion. In his Aesthetic ojthe Sublime Kant faithfully presented the power of the subject as the precondition of the sublime. True, the annihilation of the I in the face of art is to be taken no more literally than is art. Because, however, what are called aesthetic experiences [Erlebnisse] are as such psychologically real, it
would be impossible to understand them if they were simply part and parcel of the illusoriness of art. Experiences are not "as if. " The disappearance of the I in the moment of the shudder is not real; but delirium, which has a similar aspect, is nevertheless incompatible with artistic experience. For a few moments the I be- comes aware , in real terms , of the possibility of letting self-preservation fall away , though it does not actually succeed in realizing this possibility . It is not the aes- thetic shudder that is semblance but rather its attitude to objectivity: In its imme-
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diacy the shudder feels the potential as if it were actual. The I is seized by the unmetaphorical, semblance-shattering consciousness: that it itself is not ultimate, but semblance . For the subject, this transforms art into what it is in-itself, the his- torical voice of repressed nature, ultimately critical of the principle of the I, that internal agent of repression. This subjective experience [Eifahrung] directed against the I is an element of the objective truth of art. Whoever experiences [erlebt] artworks by referring them to himself, does not experience them; what passses for experience [Erlebnis] is a palmed-off cultural surrogate . Even of this surrogate one's conceptions are simplifications. The products of the culture indus- try, more shallow and standardized than any of its fans can ever be, may simulta- neously impede the identification that is their goal. The question as to what the culture industry inflicts on men and women is probably all too naIve: Its effect is much more diffuse than the form of the question suggests . The empty time filled with emptiness does not even produce false consciousness but is an exertion that leaves things just as they are .
The element of objective praxis inherent in art is transformed into subjective intention when, as a result of society's objective tendency and of the critical reflection of art, art's antithesis to society becomes irreconcilable. The accepted term for this subjective intention is commitment. Commitment is a higher level of reflection than tendency; it is not simply out to correct unpleasant situations, al- though the committed all too easily sympathize with the idea of solving problems by means of "appropriate measures. "8 Commitment aims at the transformation of the preconditions of situations, not at merely making recommendations; to this extent it inclines toward the aesthetic category of essence. The polemical self- consciousness of art presupposes its spiritualization; the more sensitized art be- comes toward that sensual immediacy with which it was formerly equated, the more critical its posture becomes toward raw reality , which - an extension of the rank growth of first nature-reproduces itself socially in ever expanded form. It is not only formally that the critically reflexive tendency toward spiritualization sharp- ens the relation of art to its subject matter. Hegel's break from sensualist aesthet- ics was of a part both with the spiritualization of the artwork and with the accen- tuation of its subject matter. Through spiritualization the artwork is transformed, in itself, into what was once blindly attested to be its effect on other spirits. - The concept of commitment is not to be taken too literally. If it is made the yard- stick of censorship, it recapitulates in its attitude toward artworks that element of dominating supervision to which they stood opposed prior to all supervisable commitment. This does not amount, however, to jettisoning categories such as that of a program or its crude progeny according to the whim of an aesthetics of taste. What they register becomes their legitimate subject matter in a phase in which they are motivated by the longing and the will that the world be other than it is. But this gives them no dispensation from the law of form; even spiritual con- tent [Inhalt] remains material and is consumed by the artworks, even when their
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self-consciousness insists that this subject matter is essence. Brecht taught noth- ing that could not have been understood apart from his didactic plays, indeed, that could not have been understood more concisely through theory , or that was not al- ready well known to his audience: That the rich are better off than the poor; that the way of the world is unjust; that repression persists within formal equality; that objective evil transforms private goodness into its own opposite; that-admit- tedly a dubious wisdom - goodness requires the masks of evil. But the sententious vehemence with which he translates these hardly dew-fresh insights into scenic gestures lends his works their tone; the didacticism led him to his dramaturgical innovations , which overthrew the moribund theater of philosophy and intrigue. In his plays, theses took on an entirely different function from the one their content [Inhalt] intended. They became constitutive; they made the drama anti-illusory and contributed to the collapse of the unitary nexus of meaning. It is this, not com- mitment, that defines their quality, yet their quality is inseparable from the com- mitment in that it becomes their mimetic element. Brecht's commitment does for the work what it gravitates toward on its own: It undermines it. As often occurs, in commitment, something that is sealed up in art becomes external by means of growing control and practicability. Artworks became for-themselves what they previously were in-themselves. The immanence of artworks, their apparently a priori distance from the empirical, would not exist without the prospect of a world transformed by self-conscious praxis. In Romeo and Juliet Shakespeare was not promoting love without familial guardianship ; but without the longing for a situa- tion in which love would no longer be mutilated and condemned by patriarchal or any other powers , the presence of the two lost in one another would not have the sweetness-the wordless, imageless utopia-over which, to this day, the cen- turies have been powerless; the taboo that prohibits knowledge of any positive utopia also reigns over artworks. Praxis is not the effect of works; rather, it is encapsuled in their truth content. This is why commitment is able to become an aesthetic force of production . In general , the bleating against tendentious art and against commitment is equally subaltern. The ideological concern to keep culture pure obeys the wish that in the fetishized culture, and thus actually, everything remains as it was. Such indignation has much in common with the opposing posi- tion's indignation that has been standardized in the phrase about the obsolete ivory tower from which, in an age zealously proclaimed an age of mass communi- cation, art must issue. The common denominator is the message; although Brecht's good taste steered him away from the word, the idea was not foreign to the posi- tivist in him. The two positions are intensely self-contradictory . Don Quixote may have served a particular and irrelevant program, that of abolishing the chivalric romance, which had been dragged along from feudal times into the bourgeois age. This modest program served as the vehicle by which the novel became an exem- plary artwork. The antagonism of literary genres in which Cervantes's work orig- inated was transformed, in his hands, into an antagonism of historical eras of,
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ultimately, metaphysical dimension: the authentic expression of the crisis of im- manent meaning in the demystified world. Works such as Werther, which have no programam tic aspect, contributed significantly to the emancipation of bourgeois consciousness in Germany. Goethe, by giving shape to the collision of society with the feelings of an individual who, finding himself alone and unloved, is driven to suicide , protested powerfully against a hardened petty bourgeoisie with- out even naming it. However, what the two basic censorial positions of bourgeois consciousness hold in common-that the artwork must not want to change the world and that it must be there for all - is a plaidoyer for the status quo; the for- mer defends the domestic peace of artworks with the world and the latter remains vigilant that the sanctioned forms of public consciousness be maintained. Today, hermetic and committed art converge in the refusal of the status quo. Interference is prohibited by reified consciousness because it reifies the already reified art- work; for reified consciousness the work's objectivation in opposition to society appears as its social neutralization. That side of artworks that faces outward is falsified as their essence without any regard to the process of their formation or, ultimately, their truth content. No artwork, however, can be socially true that is not also true in-itself; conversely , social false consciousness is equally incapable of becoming aesthetically authentic. Social and immanent aspects of artworks do not coincide, but neither do they diverge so completely as the fetishism of culture and praxis would like to believe. That whereby the truth content of artworks points beyond their aesthetic complexion, which it does only by virtue of that aesthetic complexion, assures it its social significance. This duality is not a stipu- lation that rules abstractly over the sphere of art. It is art's vital element and lodged within each and every work. Art becomes something social through its in-itself, and it becomes in-itself by means of the social force of production effec- tive in it. The dialectic of the social and of the in-itself of the artwork is the dialec- tic of its own constitution to the extent that it tolerates nothing interior that does not externalize itself, nothing external that is not the bearer of the inward, the truth content.
The dual nature of artworks as autonomous structures and social phenomena results in oscillating criteria: Autonomous works provoke the verdict of social in- difference and ultimately of being criminally reactionary; conversely, works that make socially univocal discursive judgments thereby negate art as well as them- selves. Immanent critique can possibly break through this rigid alternative. Stefan George certainly merited the reproach of being socially reactionary long before he propounded the maxims of his secret Germany, just as the poor-peoples' poetry ofthe late 1880s and 1890s, Amo Holz's, for instance, deserves to be criti- cized as being crudely unaesthetic. 9 Both types, however, should be confronted with their own concept. George's self-staged aristocratic posturings contradict the self-evident superiority that they postulate and thereby fail artistically; the verse "And- that we lack not a bouquet of myrrh" 10 is laughable, as is the verse on the
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Roman emperor who, after having his brother murdered, gently gathers up the purple train of his toga) l The brutality of George's social attitude, the result of failed identification, appears in his poetry in the violent acts of language that mar the purity of the self-sufficient work after which George aspired. In programmatic aestheticism, false social consciousness becomes the shrill tone that gives it the lie. Without ignoring the difference in quality between George, who was a great poet in spite of everything, and the mediocre naturalists , they have in common the fact that the social and critical content of their plays and poems is almost always superficial. It lags far behind what was already fully elaborated by social theory, in which they were scarcely interested. Arno Holz's parody ofpolitical hypocrisy, Social Aristocrats, suffices to prove this. Because artistically they overwhelmed society with verbiage, they felt duty bound to a vulgar idealism, as for instance in the image of the worker who dreams of something higher, whatever it may be, and who through the fate of his class origin is prevented from achieving it. The question of the provenance of his solidly bourgeois ideal of upward mobility is ignored. Naturalism's innovations-the renunciation of traditional categories of form, the distilling of the self-contained plots and even, as at points in Zola, the abandonment of the continuity of empirical time-are more advanced than its concept. The ruthless, effectively aconceptual presentation of empirical detail in Savage Paris destroyed the familiar surface coherence of the novel in a fashion not unlike that of its later monadic-associative form. As a result, naturalism re- gressed except when it took the most extreme risks. Carrying out intentions con- tradicts its principle. Yet naturalist plays abound in passages whose intention is plain: People are to speak plainly, yet in following the author's stage directions they speak as no one would ever speak. In the realist theater it is already inconsis- tent that even before they open their mouths people know so precisely what it is they are going to say. Perhaps it would be impossible to organize a realistic play ac- cording to its conception without its becoming , a contre coeur, dadaistic; through its unavoidable minimum of stylization, however, realism admits its impossibility and virtually abolishes itself. Taken in hand by the culture industry , it has become mass deception. The spiritedly unanimous rejection of Sudermannl2 may be be- cause his box office successes let out of the bag what the most talented naturalists hid: the manipulated, fictive aspect of every gesture that lays claim to being be- yond fiction when, instead, fiction envelops every word spoken on stage, however it resists and defends itself. These products, a priori cultural goods, are easily coaxed to become a nalve and affirmative image of culture . Even aesthetically there are not two types of truth. How the contradictory desiderata can reciprocally inter- penetrate without being averaged out as a mediocre compromise between a pur- portedly good form and an appropriate social content [lnhalt] can be learned from Beckett's dramatic art. Its associative logic, in which one sentence draws after it the next sentence or the reply , just as in music a theme motivates its continuation or its contrast, scorns all imitation of its empirical appearance. The result is that,
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hooded, the empirically essential is incorporated according to its exact historical importance and integrated into the play character of the work . The latter expresses the objective condition both of consciousness and of the reality that shapes it. The negativity of the subject as the true form of objectivity can only be presented in radically subjective form, not by recourse to a purportedly higher reality. The gri- macing clowns, childish and bloody, into which Beckett's subject is decomposed, are that subject' s historical truth; socialist realism is, by comparison , simply childish. In Godot the relation of domination and servitude , along with its senile lunatic form, is thematic in a phase in which control over others' labor continues, even though humanity no longer needs it for its self-preservation. This motif, truly one of the essential laws ofcontemporary society, is taken further in Endgame. In both works Beckett' s technique hurls it to the periphery: Hegel ' s chapter is trans- formed into anecdotes with sociocritical no less than dramaturgical function. In Endgame the tellurian partial catastrophe, the bloodiest of Beckett's clown jokes, is presupposed both thematically and formally in that it has obliterated art's con- stituent, its genesis. Art emigrates to a standpoint that is no longer a standpoint at all because there are no longer standpoints from which the catastrophe could be named or formed , a word that seems ridiculous in this context. Endgame is neither a play about the atom bomb nor is it contentless; the determinate negation of its content [Inhalt] becomes its formal principle and the negation of content alto- gether. Beckett's oeuvre gives the frightful answer to art that, by its starting point, by its distance from any praxis, art in the face of mortal threat becomes ideology through the harmlessness of its mere form, regardless of its content. This explains the influx of the comic into emphatic works. It has a social aspect. In that their ef- fectively blindfolded movement originates exclusively in themselves, their move- ment becomes a walking in place and declares itself as such, just as the unrelenting seriousness ofthe work declares itself as frivolous, as play. Art can only be recon- ciled with its existence by exposing its own semblance, its internal emptiness. Its most binding criterion today is that in terms of its own complexion, unreconciled with all realistic deception, it no longer tolerates anything harmless. In all art that is still possible , social critique must be raised to the level of form, to the point that it wipes out all manifestly social content [Inhalt].
With the continuing organization of all cultural spheres the desire grows to assign art its place in society theoretically and indeed practically; this is the aim of innu- merable round table conferences and symposia. Once art has been recognized as a social fact, the sociological definition of its context considers itself superior to it and disposes over it. Often the assumption is that the objectivity of value-free positivistic knowledge is superior to supposedly subjective aesthetic standpoints. Such endeavors themselves call for social criticism. They tacitly seek the primacy of administration , of the administered world even over what refuses to be grasped by total socialization or at any rate struggles against it. The sovereignty of the topographical eye that localizes phenomena in order to scrutinize their function
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and right to exist is sheer usurpation. It ignores the dialectic of aesthetic quality and functional society. A priori, in conformist fashion, the accent falls, if not on art's ideological effect, then at least on the consumability of art, while dismissing all that in which today social reflection would have its object: This is decided in advance, in conformist fashion. Because the expansion of technical administrative procedures is fused with the scientific apparatus of investigation, it appeals to those sorts of intellectuals who indeed sense something of the new social necessi- ties but nothing of the necessities of art. Their mentality is that of an imaginary sociological lecture on culture whose title should be: "The Function of Television for the Adaptation of Europe to the Developing Countries. " Social reflection on art has nothing to contribute in this spirit other than to make it thematic and thereby resist it. Then, as now, Steuermann ' s 1 3 comment holds good that the more that is done for culture , the worse it turns out.
For contemporary consciousness, and especially for student activists, the imma- nent difficulties of art, no less than its social isolation, amount to its condemna- tion. This is a sign of the historical situation, and those who want to abolish art would be the last to admit it. The avant-gardist disruptions of aesthetically avant- garde performances are as chimerical as the belief that they are revolutionary and that revolution is a form of beauty : Obtuseness to art is below, not above , culture , and commitment itself is often nothing but a lack of talent or concentration, a slackening of energy . Their most recent trick, which was admittedly already prac- ticed by Fascism, revalorizes ego-weakness, the incapacity for sublimation, as a superior quality and sets a moral premium on the line of least resistance. It is claimed that the age of art is over; now it is a matter of realizing its truth content, which is facilely equated with art's social content: The verdict is totalitarian. What today lays claim t o having been read solely out o f the material , and what in its dullness indeed offers the most compelling reason for the verdict on art, in fact does the greatest violence to the material. The moment art is prohibited and it is decreed that it must no longer be, art-in the midst of the administrative world- wins back the right to exist, the denial of which itself resembles an administrative act. Whoever wants to abolish art cherishes the illusion that decisive change is not blocked. Exaggerated realism is unrealistic. The making of every authentic work contradicts the pronunciamento that no more can be made. The abolition of art in a half-barbaric society that is tending toward total barbarism makes itself barbarism's social partner. Although their constant refrain is concreteness, they judge abstractly and summarily, blind to the precise and unsolved tasks and possi- bilities that have been repressed by the most recent aesthetic actionism, such as the tasks and possibilities of a truly freed music that traverses the freedom of the subject rather than being abandoned to thing-like alienated contingency . Yet there is no arguing over the question whether art is necessary. The question itself is falsely posed because the necessity of art - if the idea must be maintained when the issue is the realm of freedom - is its nonnecessity. To evaluate art according to
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the standard of necessity covertly prolongs the principle of exchange, the philis- tine's concern for what can be gotten for it. The verdict that it is no longer possible to put up with it, the obedient contemplation of a purportedly given state, is itself a shop-worn bourgeois gesture, the wrinkled brow that worries, "Where is this all going to end? " Yet precisely this type of teleology is inimical to art insofar as art stands as plenipotentiary for the in-itself that does not yet exist. In terms of their historicophilosophical significance, works are all the more important the less they coincide with their stage of development. The question is a surreptitious form of social control. Many contemporary works can be characterized as an anarchy that effectively implies a wish to be quit of it all . The summary judgment passed on art, which is itself inscribed on those works that would like to substitute themselves for art, resembles the verdict pronounced by Lewis Carroll's Queen of Hearts: "Off with their heads. " After these beheadings to the sound of a pop, in which the sound of Popular Music resonates, the head grows back. Art has everything to fear but the nihilism of impotence. By its social proscription, art is degraded to pre- cisely that role of/ait social that it refuses to resume. The Marxist theory of ide- ology, which is ambiguous in itself, is falsified as a total theory of ideology in Mannheimian fashion and blindly applied to art. If ideology is socially false con- sciousness, it does not follow that all consciousness is ideological. Beethoven's last quartets are consigned to the underworld of obsolete semblance only on the basis of ignorance and incomprehension . Whether art is still possible today cannot be decided from above , from the perspective of the relations of production. The question depends , rather, on the state of the forces of production. It encompasses what is possible but not yet realized: an art that refuses to let itself be terrorized by positivist ideology. As legitimate as Herbert Marcuse's critique ofthe affirmative character of culture was,14 its thesis requires the investigation of the individual artwork: Otherwise it would become an anticulture league, itself no better than any cultural asset. Rabid criticism of culture is not radical . If affirmation is indeed an aspect of art, this affirmation is no more totally false than culture-because it failed-is totally false. Culture checks barbarism, which is worse; it not only re- presses nature but conserves it through its repression; this resonates in the concept of culture , which originates in agriculture . Life has been perpetuated through cul- ture , along with the idea of a decent life; its echo resounds in authentic artworks . Affirmation does not bestow a halo on the status quo; in sympathy with what exists, it defends itself against death, the telos of all domination. Doubting this comes only at the price of believing that death itself is hope.
The double character of art-something that severs itself from empirical reality and thereby from society's functional context and yet is at the same time part of empirical reality and society's functional context-is directly apparent in the aes- thetic phenomena, which are both aesthetic and/ails sociaux. They require a dou- ble observation that is no more to be posited as an unalloyed whole than aesthetic autonomy and art can be conflated as something strictly social. This double char-
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acter becomes physiognomically decipherable, whether intentionally so or not, when one views or listens to art from an external vantage point, and, certainly , art always stands in need of this external perspective for protection from the fetish- ization of its autonomy. Music, whether it is played in a cafe or, as is often the case in America, piped into restaurants, can be transformed into something com- pletely different, of which the hum of conversation and the rattle of dishes and whatever else becomes a part. To fulfill its function, this music presupposes dis- tracted listeners no less than in its autonomous state it expects attentiveness. A medley is sometimes made up of parts of artworks, but through this montage the parts are fundamentally transformed. Functions such as warming people up and drowning out silence recasts music as something defined as mood, the commodi- fied negation of the boredom produced by the grey-on-grey commodity world. The sphere of entertainment, which has long been integrated into production, amounts to the domination of this element of art over all the rest of its phenomena. These elements are antagonistic. The subordination of autonomous artworks to the element of social function buried within each work and from which art origi- nated in the course of a protracted struggle, wounds art at its most vulnerable point. Yet someone sitting in a cafe who is suddenly struck by the music and lis- tens intensely may feel odd to himself and seem foolish to others . In this antago- nism the fundamental relation of art and society appears .
The continuity of art is destroyed when it is experienced externally, just as medleys willfully destroy it in the material. Heard in the corridors of the concert hall, little remains of one of Beethoven's orchestral works than the imperial kettle drum; even in the score the drums represent an authoritarian gesture, which the work borrowed from society in order to sublimate it in the elaboration of the composition. For art's two char- acters are not completely indifferent to each other. If a work of authentic music strays into the social sphere of background music, it may unexpectedly transcend that sphere by the purity that is stained by social function. On the other hand, the derivation ofauthentic works from social functions, as in the case ofBeethoven's kettle drums, cannot be washed away; Wagner's irritation with those vestiges of divertissement in Mozart has since been sharpened into a soup{:on even against those works that voluntarily bid farewell to entertainment. After the age of aes- thetic autonomy , the position of artists in society , to the extent that it is significant with regard to mass reception, tends to revert into heterogeneity. If prior to the French Revolution artists were lackeys, they have since become entertainers. The culture industry calls its crack performers by their first name , just as head waiters and hair dressers chummily refer to the jet set. The demolition of the difference between the artist as aesthetic subject and the artist as empirical person also attests to the abolition of the distance of the artwork from the empirical world, without however art's thereby returning to a realm of freedom, which in any case does not exist. This deceptively manufactured proximity of art serves profit. From the vantage point of art, its double character clings to each of its works as a flaw of its
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dishonest origin, just as socially artists were once treated as dishonest persons. This same origin, however, is also the locus of its mimetic essence. Its dishonesty, which contradicts the dignity laid claim to by its autonomy, which puffs itself up out of guilt over its participation in society, redounds to its honor as mockery of the honesty of socially useful labor.
The relation of social praxis and art, always variable, may well have changed radi- cally once again over the last forty or fifty years . During World War I and prior to Stalin, artistic and politically advanced thought went in tandem; whoever came of age in those years took art to be what it in no way historically had been: a priori politically on the left. Since then the Zhdanovs and Ulbrichts have not only en- chained the force of artistic production with the dictate of socialist realism but actually broken it; socially the aesthetic regression for which they are responsible is transparent as a petty bourgeois fixation. By comparison, during the decades after the Second War, with the world divided into two political blocs, the ruling interests in the West have signed a revocable peace with radical art; abstract paint- ing is subsidized by heavy German industry, and in France de Gaulle's minister of culture is Andre Malraux . Avant-garde doctrines, if their opposition to com- munis opinio is grasped with sufficient abstractness and if they remain to some degree moderate, are sometimes susceptible to elitist reinterpretation, as has been the case with Pound and Eliot. Benjamin already noted the fascist penchant in futurism, which can be traced back to peripheral aspects of Baudelaire's mod- ernism. 15 All the same, when Benjamin in his later work distanced himself from the aesthetic avant-garde at those points where it failed to toe the Communist Party line, Brecht's hatred of Tui intellectuals may well have played a part. The elitist isolation of advanced art is less its doing than society's; the unconscious standards of the masses are the same as those necessary to the preservation of the relations in which the masses are integrated, and the pressure of heteronomous life makes distraction compulsory, thus prohibiting the concentration of a strong ego that is requisite to the experience of the nonstereotypical. This breeds resent- ment: the resentment of the masses toward what is denied them by the education that is reserved for the privileged; and-ever since Strindberg and Schoenberg- resentment of the aesthetically progressive toward the masses. The yawning schism between their aesthetic trouvailles and a political posture that is manifest in the content [InhaltJ and intention of works, significantly damages artistic consistency. The social interpretation of older literature in terms of its political content [Inhalt] is ofuncertain value. The interpretation of Greek myths, such as Vico's interpretation of that of Cadmus, was ingenious. Yet the reduction of Shakespeare's plays to the idea of class struggle, as Brecht meant to do, goes too far and misses what is essential, except in those dramas where class struggle is clearly a theme. This is not to claim that what is essential is indifferent to society and, in human terms, timeless: That is drivel. Rather, the social element is medi- ated by the objective formal posture of the plays, what Lukacs called their "per-
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spective. " What is social in Shakespeare is categories such as those of the individ- ual and passion: traits such as Caliban's bourgeois concreteness and the corrupt Venetian merchants, the conception of a semimatriarchal world in Macbeth and King Lear; the complete disgust for power in Antony and Cleopatra as well as Prospero's gesture of resignation. By contrast, the conflicts of patricians and plebeians drawn from Roman history are merely cultural goods. In Shakespeare, the more literally the Marxist thesis is held that all history is that of class struggle, the more dubious it appears. Class struggle objectively presupposes a high level of social integration and differentiation, and subjectively it requires class con- sciousness, which first developed rudimentarily in bourgeois society. It is nothing new to note that class itself, the social subsumption of atoms to a general concept that expresses their constitutive as well as heterogeneous relations, is structurally a bourgeois reality. Social antagonisms are as old as the hills; only desultorily did they become class struggles: where market economies related to bourgeois soci- ety began to take shape. For this reason the interpretation of everything historical as class struggle has a slightly anachronistic air,just as the model ofall ofMarx's constructions and extrapolations was that of liberal entrepreneurial capitalism. True , social antagonisms shimmer through Shakespeare ' s plays at every point, yet they are manifest in individuals and are collective only in crowd scenes that fol- low topoi such as that of the suggestibility of mobs. From a social perspective it is at least evident that Shakespeare could not have been Bacon . That early bourgeois dialectical dramatist beheld the theatrum mundi not from the perspective of pro- gress but from that of the victims of progress. Severing this ensnarement through social as well as aesthetic maturation is made prohibitively difficult by the social structure. If in art formal characteristics are not facilely interpretable in political terms, everything formal in art nevertheless has substantive implications and they extend into politics. The liberation of form, which genuinely new art desires, holds enciphered within it above all the liberation of society, for form-the social nexus of everything particular-represents the social relation in the artwork; this is why liberated form is anathema to the status quo. This is confirmed by psycho- analysis. It holds that all art, the negation of the reality principle, protests against the image of the father and is to this extent revolutionary. This objectively implies the political participation of the unpolitical . So long as social imbrication was not yet so agglomerated that form itself became subversive protest, the relation of art- works to existing social reality was less contentious. Without altogether surren- dering to this reality, art was able to appropriate social elements without any great to-do, to continue clearly to resemble society , and to communicate with it. Today the socially critical aspect of artworks has become opposition to empirical reality as such because the latter has become its own self-duplicating ideology, the quin- tessence of domination. Whether art in turn becomes socially irrelevant-empty play and decoration of social bustle-depends on the extent to which its construc- tions and montages are simultaneously de-montages, destroying while receiving
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the elements of reality and shaping them freely as something other. The unity of art's aesthetic and social criteria is constituted by whether, in transcending empir- ical reality, it succeeds at concretizing its relation to what it has transcended; in doing so it gains a sort of prerogative. Without letting itself be put upon by politi- cal activists to provide the messages that suit them, art would then harbor no doubt as to what it is after. Fearless of any contradiction, Picasso and Sartre opted for a politics that disdained what they stood for aesthetically and only put up with them to the extent that their names had propaganda value . Their attitude is impres- sive because they do not subjectively dissolve the contradiction, which has an ob- jective justification, by the univocal commitment to one thesis or its opposite. The critique of their attitude is pertinent only as one of the politics for which they vote; the smug assertion that they only hurt themselves misses the point. Hardly last among the aporia of the age is that no thought holds true that does not do damage to the interests, even the objective interests, of those who foster it.
Today the nomenclature of formalism and socialist realism is used, with great consequence, to distinguish between the autonomous and the social essence of art. This nomenclature is employed by the administered world to exploit for its own purposes the objective dialectic that inheres in the double character of each and every artwork: These two aspects are severed from each other and used to divide the sheep from the goats . This dichotomization is false because it presents the two dynamically related elements as simple alternatives. The individual artist is supposed to choose. Thanks to an ever present social master plan, inclination is always encouraged in the antiformalistic directions; the others are pronounced narrow specializations restricted to the division of labor and possibly even susceptible to naIve bourgeois illusions. The loving care with which appara- tchiks lead refractory artists out of their isolation tallies with the assassination of Meyerhold. 16 In truth the abstract antithesis of formalistic and antiformalistic art cannot be maintained once art wants to be more than an open or covert pep talk. Around the time of World War I, or somewhat later modem painting polarized into cubism and surrealism. But cubism itself revolted, in terms of its actual con- tent [Inhalt], against the bourgeois idea of a gaplessly pure immanence of art- works. Conversely, important surrealists such as Max Ernst and Andre Masson, who refused to collude with the market and initially protested against the sphere of art itself, gradually turned toward formal principles, and Masson largely aban- doned representation, as the idea of shock, which dissipates quickly in the the- matic material, was transformed into a technique of painting. With the intention to unmask the habitual world in a flash of light as semblance and illusion, the step toward nonrepresentational art has teleologically already been taken. Construc- tivism, officially the antagonist of realism, has by virtue of its anti-illusory lan- guage deeper relations with the historical transformation of reality than does a realism long overlaid with a romantic varnish because its principle-the sham reconciliation with the object-has gradually become romantic. With regard to
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content, the impulses of constructivism were those of the ever problematic adequacy of art to the disenchanted world, which could no longer be achieved by traditional realism without becoming academic. Today whatever proclaims itself informelle17 becomes aesthetic only by articulating itself as form; otherwise it would amount to no more than a document. In the case of such exemplary artists of the epoch as Schoenberg, Klee, and Picasso, the expressive mimetic element and the constructive element are of equal intensity, not by seeking a happy mean between them but rather by way of the extremes: Yet each is simultaneously content-laden, expression is the negativity of suffering, and construction is the effort to bear up under the suffering of alienation by exceeding it on the horizon of undiminished and thus no longer violent rationality. Just as in thought, form and content are as distinct as they are mediated in one another, so too in art. The concepts of progress and reaction are hardly applicable to art as long as the ab- stract dichotomy of form and content is acceded to. This dichotomy is recapitu- lated in assertion and counterassertion. Some call artists reactionary because they purportedly champion socially reactionary theses or because through the form of their works they supposedly aid political reason in some admittedly discreet and not quite graspable fashion; others dub artists reactionary for falling behind the level of artistic forces of production. But the content [Gehalt] of important art- works can deviate from the opinion of their authors . It is obvious that Strindberg repressively inverted Ibsen's bourgeois-emancipatory intentions. On the other hand, his formal innovations, the dissolution of dramatic realism and the recon- struction of dreamlike experience, are objectively critical. They attest to the transition of society toward horror more authentically than do Gorki's bravest accusations. To this extent they are also socially progressive, the dawning self- consciousness of that catastrophe for which the bourgeois individualistic society is preparing: In it the absolutely individual becomes a ghost as in Ghost Sonata. In counterpoint to this are the greatest works of naturalism: the unmitigated horror of the first act of Hauptmann's Hannele's Ascension causes the reversal of faithful reproduction into the wildest expression. Social criticism of a politically decreed resuscitation of realism is important, however, only if it does not capitulate vis-a- vis l'art pour l'art. What is socially untrue in that protest against society has become socially evident. The carefully chosen words, for instance, of a Barbey
d' Aurevilly have since dulled to an old-fashioned naIvete hardly befitting any ar- tificial paradise; Aldous Huxley was already struck by the emerging comicalness of Satanism. The evil that both Baudelaire and Nietzsche found to be lacking in the liberalistic nineteenth century, was for them nothing more than the mask of drives no longer subject to Victorian repression. As a product of the repressed drives of the twentieth century, evil broke through the civilizatory hurdles with a bestiality compared to which Baudelaire's outrageous blasphemies took on a harmlessness that contrasts grotesquely with their pathos. Despite his preemi- nence, Baudelaire presaged Jugendstil. Its lie was the beautification of life with-
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out its transfonnation; beauty itself thereby became vacuous and, like all abstract negation, allowed itself to be integrated into what it negated . The phantasmagoria of an aesthetic world undisturbed by purposes of any kind became an alibi for the subaesthetic world.
It can be said that philosophy, and theoretical thought as a whole, suffers from an idealist prejudice insofar as it disposes solely over concepts; only through them does it treat what they are concerned with, which it itself never has. Its labor of Sisyphus is that it must reflect the untruth and guilt that it takes on itself, thereby correcting it when possible. It cannot paste its ontic substratum into the text; by speaking of it, philosophy already makes it into what it wants to free itself from. Modem art has registered dissatisfaction with this ever since Picasso disrupted his pictures with scraps of newspaper, an act from which all montage derives. The social element is aesthetically done justice in that it is not imitated, which would effectively make it fit for art, but is, rather, injected into art by an act of sabotage. Art itself explodes the deception of its pure immanence , just as the empirical ruins divested of their own context accommodate themselves to the immanent princi- ples of construction . By conspicuously and willfully ceding to crude material , art wants to undo the damage that spirit-thought as well as art-has done to its other, to which it refers and which it wants to make eloquent. This is the deter- minable meaning of the meaningless intention-alien element of modem art, which extends from the hybridization of the arts to the happenings. 18 It is not so much that traditional art is thereby sanctimoniously condemned by an arriviste judg- ment but that, rather, the effort is made to absorb even the negation of art by its own force. What is no longer socially possible in traditional art does not on that account surrender all truth. Instead it sinks to a historical, geological stratum that is no longer accessible to living consciousness except through negation but with- out which no art would exist: a stratum of mute reference to what is beautiful, without all that strict a distinction between nature and work. This element is con- trary to the disintegrative element into which the truth of art has changed; yet it survives because as the fonning force it recognizes the violence of that by which it measures itself. It is through this idea that art is related to peace. Without per- spective on peace, art would be as untrue as when it anticipates reconciliation. Beauty in art is the semblance of the truly peaceful. It is this toward which even the repressive violence of fonn tends in its unification of hostile and divergent elements.
It is false to arrive at aesthetic realism from the premise of philosophical material- ism. Certainly, art, as a fonn of knowledge, implies knowledge of reality, and there is no reality that is not social. Thus truth content and social content are medi- ated, although art's truth content transcends the knowledge of reality as what ex- ists. Art becomes social knowledge by grasping the essence, not by endlessly talk- ing about it, illustrating it, or somehow imitating it. Through its own figuration, art brings the essence into appearance in opposition to its own semblance. The
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epistemological critique of idealism, which secures for the object an element of primacy, cannot simply be transposed to art. Object in art and object in empirical reality are entirely distinct. In art the object is the work produced by art, as much containing elements of empirical reality as displacing, dissolving, and reconstruct- ing them according to the work's own law. Only through such transformation, and not through an ever falsifying photography, does art give empirical reality its due, the epiphany of its shrouded essence and the merited shudder in the face of it as in the face of a monstrosity. The primacy of the object is affirmed aesthetically only in the character of art as the unconscious writing of history, as anamnesis of the vanquished, of the repressed, and perhaps of what is possible. The primacy of the object, as the potential freedom from domination of what is , manifests itself in art as its freedom from objects. If art must grasp its content [Gehalt] in its other, this other is not to be imputed to it but falls to it solely in its own immanent nexus. Art negates the negativity in the primacy of the object, negates what is heteronomous and unreconciled in it, which art allows to emerge even through the semblance of the reconciliation of its works .
At first glance one argument of dialectical materialism bears persuasive force. The standpoint of radical modernism, it is claimed, is that of solipsism, that of a monad that obstinately barricades itself against intersubjectivity; the reified divi- sion of labor has run amok. This derides the humanity that awaits realization. However, this solipsism-the argument continues-is illusory, as materialistic criticism and long before that great philosophy have demonstrated; it is the delu- sion of the immediacy of the for-itself that ideologically refuses to admit its own mediations . It is true that theory , through insight into universal social mediation, has conceptually surpassed solipsism. But art, mimesis driven to the point of self- consciousness, is nevertheless bound up with feeling, with the immediacy of experience; otherwise it would be indistinguishable from science, at best an in- stallment plan on its results and usually no more than social reporting. Collective modes of production by small groups are already conceivable , and in some media even requisite; monads are the locus of experience in all existing societies. Be- cause individuation, along with the suffering that it involves, is a social law, soci- ety can only be experienced individually. The substruction of an immediately col- lective subject would be duplicitous and would condemn the artwork to untruth because it would withdraw the single possibility of experience that is open to it today. If on the basis of theoretical insight art orients itself correctively, according to its own mediatedness, and seeks to escape from the monadic character that it has recognized as social semblance, historical truth remains external to it and becomes untruth: The artwork heteronomously sacrifices its immanent determina- tion. According to critical theory, mere consciousness of society does not in any real sense lead beyond the socially imposed objective structure, any more than the
artwork does, which in terms of its own determinations is itself a part of social reality . The capacity that dialectical materialisin antimaterialistically ascribes to
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and demands of the artwork is achieved by that artwork, if at all, when in its ob- jectively imposed monadologically closed structure it pushes its situation so far that it becomes the critique of this situation. The true threshold between art and other knowledge may be that the latter is able to think beyond itself without abdi- cating, whereas art produces nothing valid that it does not fill out on the basis of the historical standpoint at which it finds itself. The innervation of what is his- torically possible for it is essential to the artistic form of reaction. In art, substan- tiality means just this . If for the sake of a higher social truth art wants more than the experience that is accessible to it and that it can form, that experience becomes less, and the objective truth that it posits as its measure collapses as a fiction that patches over the fissure between subject and object. They are so falsely reconciled by a trumped-up realism that the most utopian phantasies of a future art would be unable to conceive of one that would once again be realistic without falling back into unfreedom. Art possesses its other immanently because, like the subject, im- manence is socially mediated in itself. It must make its latent social content elo- quent: It must go within in order to go beyond itself. It carries out the critique of solipsism through the force of externalization in its own technique as the tech- nique of objectivation. By virtue of its form, art transcends the impoverished, en- trapped subject; what wants willfully to drown out its entrapment becomes infan- tile and makes out of its heteronomy a social-ethical accomplishment. It may be objected here that the various peoples' democracies are still antagonistic and that they therefore preclude any but an alienated standpoint, yet it is to be hoped that an actualized humanism would be blessedly free of the need for modern art and
would once again be content with traditional art. This concessional argument, however, is actually not all that distinct from the doctrine of overcoming individ- ualism. To put it bluntly, it is based on the philistine cliche that modern art is as ugly as the world in which it originates , that the world deserves it and nothing else would be possible, yet surely it cannot go on like this forever. In truth, there is nothing to overcome; the word itself is indexfalsi. There is no denying that the antagonistic situation, what the young Marx called alienation and self-alienation, was not the weakest agency in the constitution of modern art. But modern art was certainly no copy , not the reproduction of that situation. In denouncing it, trans- posing it into the image, this situation became its other and as free as the situation denies the living to be. If today art has become the ideological complement of a world not at peace , it is possible that the art of the past will someday devolve upon society at peace; it would, however, amount to the sacrifice of its freedom were new art to return to peace and order, to affirmative replication and harmony. Nor is it possible to sketch the form of art in a changed society . In comparison with past art and the art of the present it will probably again be something else; but it would be preferable that some fine day art vanish altogether than that it forget the suffering that is its expression and in which form has its substance. This suffering is the humane content that unfreedom counterfeits as positivity. If in fulfillment of
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the wish a future art were once again to become positive, then the suspicion that negativity were in actuality persisting would become acute; this suspicion is ever present, regression threatens unremittingly, and freedom-surely freedom from the principle of possession -cannot be possessed. But then what would art be, as the writing of history , if it shook off the memory of accumulated suffering.
Paralipomena
Aesthetics presents philosophy with the bill for the fact that the academic system degraded it to being a mere specialization. It demands of philosophy precisely what philosophy has neglected to do: that it extract phenomena from their exis- tence and bring them to self-reflection; this would be the reflection of what is pet- rified in the sciences, not a specialized science located beyond them. Aesthetics thereby yields to what its object, like any object, immediately seeks. Every art- work, if it is to be fully experienced, requires thought and therefore stands in need of philosophy, which is nothing but the thought that refuses all restrictions. Under- standing [ Verstehen] and criticism are one; the capacity of understanding, that of comprehending what is understood as something spiritual, is none other than that of distinguishing in the object what is true and false, however much this distinc- tion must deviate from the procedure of ordinary logic. Emphatically , art is knowl- edge, though not the knowledge of objects. Only he understands an artwork who grasps it as a complex nexus of truth , which inevitably involves its relation to un- truth, its own as well as that external to it; any other judgment of artworks would remain arbitrary. Artworks thus demand an adequate relation to themselves. They postulate what was once the aim of the philosophy of art, which, in its present form, it no longer accomplishes, neither vis-a-vis contemporary consciousness nor vis-a-vis current artworks.
The idea o f a value-free aesthetics i s nonsense. T o understand artworks , as Brecht , incidentally, well knew, means to become aware of their logicality and its oppo- site, and of their fissures and their significance. No one can understand Wagner's
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Meistersinger who fails to perceive that element denounced by Nietzsche of a nar- cissistically self-staging positivity, that is, its element of untruth. The diremption of understanding and value is a scientific institution; without values nothing is understood aesthetically, and vice versa. In art, more than in any other sphere, it is right to speak of value. Like a mime, every work says: ''I'm good, no? "; to which what responds is a comportment that knows to value.
While the effort of aesthetics today presupposes the critique of its universal prin- ciples and norms as binding, this effort is itself necessarily restricted to the me- dium of universal thought. It is not within the purview of aesthetics to abolish this contradiction. Aesthetics must acknowledge the contradiction and reflect it, obe- dient to the theoretical need that art categorically registers in the age of its reflec- tion . The necessity , however, of such universality in no way legitimates a positive doctrine of aesthetic invariants. In the obligatorily universal determinations, his- torical processes have sedimented what-to vary an Aristotelian formula-art was. The universal determinations of art are what art developed into. The histori- cal situation of art, which has lost any sense of art's very raison d'etre, turns to the past in the hope of finding the concept of art, which retrospectively acquires a sort of unity. This unity is not abstract but is, rather, the unfolding ofart according to its own concept. At every point, therefore, the theory of art presupposes con- crete analyses, not as proofs and examples but as its own condition. Benjamin, who philosophically potentiated to the extreme the immersion in concrete art- works , was himself motivated toward a tum to universal reflection in his theory of reproduction . 1
The requirement that aesthetics be the reflection of artistic experience without relinquishing its resolutely theoretical character can best be fulfilled by incorpo- rating the movement of the concept into the traditional categories and confronting them with artistic experience. At the same time, no continuum between the poles is to be construed. The medium of theory is abstract and this is not to be masked by the use of illustrative examples . And yet, a spark may occasionally flash up - as it did in Hegel's Phenomenology ofSpirit-between the concretion of spiritual experience and the medium of the universal concept. This can occur in such a fashion that the concrete is not merely an illustration but rather the thing itself, around which abstract reasoning turns, yet without which the name is not to be found. To this end, aesthetics must take its orientation from the process of produc- tion, which encompasses the objective problems and desiderata presented by the products themselves. The primacy of the sphere of production in artworks is the primacy of their nature as products of social labor, by contrast with the contin- gency of their subjective origins. The relation to the traditional categories, how- ever, is unavoidable because only the reflection of these categories makes it possi- ble to open theory to artistic experience. In the transformation of the categories,
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which such reflection expresses and effects, historical experience penetrates theory. Through the historical dialectic, which thought liberates in the traditional categories , these categories lose their spurious abstractness without sacrificing the universal that inheres in thought: Aesthetics aims at concrete universality. The most ingenious analyses of individual works are not necessarily aesthetics; this is their inadequacy as well as their superiority over what is called the science of art. Recourse to the traditional categories is legitimated by actual artistic experience, for these categories do not simply vanish from contemporary works but return in their negation. Experience culminates in aesthetics: It makes coherent and conscious what transpires in artworks obscurely and unelucidated, and what in- sufficiently transpires in the particular artwork. In this regard, even a nonidealistic aesthetics is concerned with "ideas. "
The qualitative difference between art and science does not simply consist in using the latter as an instrument for knowing the former. The categories employed by science stand in so obtuse a relation to the inner-artistic categories that their direct projection onto the extra-aesthetic categories inevitably wipes out what the investigation was supposed to explain. The growing relevance of technology in artworks must not become a motive for subordinating them to that type of reason that produced technology and finds its continuation in it.
What survives of the classical is the idea of artworks as something objective, mediated by subjectivity. Otherwise art would in fact be an arbitrary, insignificant, and perhaps historically outdated amusement. It would be reduced to the level of an ersatz produced by a society whose energy is no longer consumed by the acqui- sition of means of subsistence and in which, nevertheless, direct instinctual satis- faction is limited. Art opposes this as the tenacious protest against a positivism that would prefer to subordinate it to a universal heteronomy. Not that art, drawn into the social web of delusion, could not actually be what it opposes. Yet its exis- tence is incompatible with the forces that want to humble and subsume it. What speaks out of important artworks is opposed to subjective reason's claim to total- ity. Its untruth becomes manifest in the objectivity of artworks.